Lessons in Hope

by George Weigel

  I was deeply touched by Teresa Życzkowska’s willingness to share her letters and notes, which even her close Środowisko friends hadn’t seen before. The topics—her emotional life, finding a husband and then learning to live a good marriage, coping with children—were not the easiest to discuss. There were moments when we were reading the letters that the emotion started coming to the surface, even after forty years. That she was willing to do this with someone she had only met once before, in order to straighten out a misimpression of Wujek that this smart and feisty woman thought completely ridiculous, said a lot about her—and about him.

  In Rome on December 15, Joaquín Navarro-Valls called to say we were dining with the Pope that evening. I brought along the Christmas greetings that Monica’s and Stephen’s classes had written; one of Stephen’s classmates also made a two-foot-tall Styrofoam model pope, which I was to deliver to the real Pope. All of these were laid out on a table in the parlor where Navarro and I waited for John Paul, who came in, enjoyed the cards, raised an amused eyebrow at the Styrofoam pope, and walked us into the dining room.

  We talked again about the possibility of his having a Carmelite vocation, and I was surprised to see that, when the Pope started talking about his debt to Jan Tyranowski, both Dziwisz and Navarro seemed to find this news. When John Paul said that Archbishop Sapieha had told him during the war, when he inquired about the Carmelites, “First you must finish what you started,” Dziwisz muttered, semi–sotto voce, “A good bishop…”

  Lutheran theologian George Lindbeck had sent me a story from Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust that claimed that young Father Wojtyła declined to baptize a small Jewish orphan until it could be determined whether the youngster had living relatives who wanted to adopt the child and give it a Jewish upbringing. “It’s a legend,” the Pope replied, and one he’d evidently heard before. “I simply don’t remember doing it.” There was no suggestion that his having done such a thing would have been out of character; it would have been entirely in character. “But I cannot remember such an incident.”

  There was still a bit of detritus to clean up from earlier biographical projects, so I pressed the Pope about an alleged March 1981 meeting with the Soviet ambassador to Italy, during a very tense period with Solidarity in Poland. Previous biographers had made a fuss over this; it sounded fishy to me; the Pope had said in a previous conversation that he didn’t remember any such meeting; and I wanted to nail the point down. Dziwisz left the table, came back a few minutes later with a large leather-bound desk diary, carefully went through every entry for March 1981, and said, “There was no such meeting.” I replied that there must have been some disinformation at work, into which my predecessor biographers had been trapped, and everyone agreed.

  Then I said to Dziwisz, “What is that?” He said, “Oh, I have one of these for every year of the pontificate.” So a question I first posed in September 1996, over dinner at Castel Gandolfo, was answered. I had told the Pope then that I would like to see any memoranda of conversations he had dictated after meeting with Gromyko and other such people. “I don’t do those,” he replied. What he did do, evidently, was get together with Dziwisz every night, and the two of them went over every meeting of the day, on or off the official calendar, noting in those diaries themes discussed and important points; the diaries were kept for future reference in the papal apartment. Why? Because, I surmised, they knew the Vatican had been seriously penetrated by Soviet-bloc intelligence services, and they didn’t want any paper on sensitive matters to be filed in the Secretariat of State, where it might be accessible to hands with malign intentions.

  Laden with Christmas presents, I left the papal apartment after a big hug from John Paul II, pondering the fact that this mystically inclined poet who believed that everyone lived for love also had a firm grip on the realities of human weakness, including the weaknesses, and worse, in his own bureaucratic surround.

  IMPEACHMENT INTERVENES

  WASHINGTON, JULY 1998–FEBRUARY 1999

  BY 1998, I HAD BEEN DRAFTING SPEECHES FOR CONGRESSMAN Henry Hyde for fourteen years. I couldn’t possibly have imagined when we met that one day I would be writing texts for Henry that would help set the moral framework for an impeachment inquiry against the President of the United States in the Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives, or later in the House’s debate over articles of impeachment, or still later in the president’s trial before the Senate. Still less could I have imagined doing all of that while writing and editing the biography of John Paul II. But that is what happened between the summer of 1998 and February 1999.

  It was more than a bit hectic. On the days before Henry needed something, I would work in the morning and the early afternoon on John Paul II, either writing or editing; then I would spend, say, 5–7 p.m. on impeachment affairs; then after dinner I’d do a bit more work on the Pope.

  Henry Hyde was a model of fairness throughout the House Judiciary Committee inquiry, the House debate, and the Senate trial, as a stalwart defender of President Clinton, Representative Barney Frank, later acknowledged. Henry’s own falls from grace, decades in the past, were dredged up by reporters, aided and abetted (I am convinced) by unscrupulous Clintonistas—all of whom, like too many in the media, imagined that this entire business was a matter of extracurricular sex. Henry was badly hurt by these revelations and called me late one night, saying he was thinking of resigning. I replied that no two people I ever met had been more married than he and Jeanne (who had died in 1992) and that he owed it both to her forgiveness and his duty to press ahead. Which he did, in the conviction that President Bill Clinton had put the Congress and the country in an impossible position: for how could the nation have as its supreme law-enforcement official a man guilty of crimes—perjury and obstruction of justice—for which more than a hundred other men and women were serving time in federal prisons?

  When the House managers solemnly carried the articles of impeachment across the Capitol to the Senate on the night of December 19, 1998, Henry Hyde saw in Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott’s eyes that (as he told me later that night) “we’re not going to make it; Trent won’t fight.” I replied that, if we were going to lose, then we should create a public record with which history would have to reckon. So rather than let the trial of the president descend into farce, Henry tried heroically to keep the country focused on the nobility of the rule of law.

  The Senate, voting largely along partisan lines, acquitted the president on February 12, 1999. But students of American history will read Henry Hyde on the impeachment and trial of President Bill Clinton for decades after Clinton’s memoir and its bitter criticisms of Hyde is pulped. Throughout this entire episode, for all that it was a distraction from my biographical labors, I couldn’t help feeling that what I was doing with Henry was a matter of vindicating John Paul II’s faith in the United States as the model of a law-governed democracy.

  LAST LAP

  WASHINGTON AND ROME, JANUARY–JUNE 1999

  DIANE REVERAND AT HARPERCOLLINS SECURED THE HELP OF A talented freelance editor, Carolyn Fireside, to edit the two-thousand-plus-page manuscript that would become a book in which, Diane said, “the [page] number 1,000 will not appear!” It was a good editorial collaboration, and Carolyn was particularly helpful in whittling down papal documents and addresses to tolerable and readable length. Diane and Carolyn sent me edited copy on the fly; I reedited by hand and rekeyed the reedits on my study desktop computer before sending things back to New York. The routine we established went well, despite getting off to a bad start, thanks to a fierce ice-and-snow storm in Washington in early 1999. There was no electricity in the house, and the children bailed to the homes of electrified friends. Joan and I held the fort in North Bethesda, and for days I sat in my study, clad in a Navy peacoat and wearing gloves with the fingers chopped off, editing by hand until power was restored.

  I had another bit of fun at this stage of the project. On my Roman research trips I was often hosted by NAC seminari
an Christopher Nalty and his friends at a student kitchen in the college known as “The Carnivor” (spelled just like that). They insisted that our evenings of rigatoni all’amatriciana, rib-eye steaks, and Tuscan wines had to be memorialized in Witness to Hope. I agreed but told them that they’d have to search for the reference. Having determined that there was no Polish equivalent of the English word carnivore, Rodger and Magda Potocki came up with the neologism mięsożerny, meaning, more or less, “meat-eater.” So my thanks to “Krzysztof Mięsożerny and his colleagues” were duly inscribed in the book’s acknowledgments. “Krzysztof” Nalty and his friends were stumped until another member of the Carnivor set, Roger Landry, brought the book to a NAC student who knew Polish, asking him to look at all the Polish names in the acknowledgments. He found what my NAC friends were looking for and said, in his somewhat halting English, “This is not Polish name. It is not really very good word. It means ‘meat-eater’!”

  One of Diane Reverand’s other gifts to the project was to assign the book to a superb copy editor, Sue Llewellyn, with whom I quickly developed a friendly and cooperative relationship. There are lots of problems with making a book of more than five hundred thousand words as error-free as possible, and as I said time and again to the patient Sue, “The standard is perfection.” We didn’t meet that lofty goal, but the finished product was as close to flawless as we could make it. There was one hair-raising moment at the galley proof stage when a computer glitch led to almost an entire chapter of endnotes—almost a hundred of them—being misnumbered. But after a panicky moment or two I figured out what had gone wrong and we fixed the problem.

  One other potential faux pas sticks in my mind. I had chosen the cover photo for the book, and when the proofs of the cover came, I thought it looked terrific. Then I looked again, picked up the phone, and called my pastor, Monsignor Donald Essex: “Have you got a cassock in the rectory that I can look at quickly?” He must have thought I was coming unglued but said I was welcome to come and inspect one of his choir cassocks, which I did fifteen minutes later. And happily so, for what was nagging me about the cover came clear: the buttons were on the wrong side of the Pope’s white cassock, because the cover designers had inadvertently reversed the photographic image. Thanking Msgr. Essex, I quickly drove home, called New York, and things got straightened out.

  I was invited to address the Young Presidents’ Organization in Rome in June 1999; Monica was in the city attending a University of Dallas “Shakespeare in Italy” program for high school students; so it seemed a good moment for Joan and me to have a brief holiday there before what promised to be a very busy fall. On June 22, I wrote Bishop Dziwisz, explaining the publication plans for the book—the United States in October; France, Italy, and Spain in November; Poland in the spring of 2000; other language editions to follow. I also mentioned that Joan and I were in the city, and an invitation to dinner on Sunday, June 27, followed.

  It was a glorious Roman early-summer evening, and Joan and I were walking slowly up the Via della Conciliazione toward St. Peter’s Square when a small blue car pulled over next to us and a voice said in shaky English, “Get in.” It was Msgr. Mokrzycki, who said, “There are a lot of people visiting the Holy Father right now. Stanislao thought there might be some confusion getting you in, and he sent me to find you. I thought you might be walking this way.” After taking us up on the family elevator, Mokrzycki put us in the usual parlor and told us to make ourselves at home, as he had to get back to the Sala Clementina, where the Pope was being serenaded by a Polish choir. So there we were, with the papal apartment to ourselves.

  Joan had been in the chapel once for Mass but it had been very crowded, so I suggested that we walk down there so she could see it again. The windows of the chapel open into the Sala Clementina on the floor below, so we could hear the choir singing as we sat in the papal chapel by ourselves. It was beautiful—indeed, it was almost unreal—and I said “Let’s not forget this; it may not happen again.”

  John Paul was in very good form after spending an hour with the choir and the dinner conversation ranged all over the landscape. Dziwisz grilled me about the Church’s situation in the United States; there was some talk of Joan’s parents having known Mother Teresa in Calcutta; we spoke of the upcoming Great Jubilee of 2000. I explained a bit more about publication plans and said to the Pope, “So you can’t do anything historic for the next three months.” He shrugged—and declined to agree.

  The evening was a fitting cap to what had begun three and a half years before at a dinner of consequence. Now there was nothing to do but wait for Witness to Hope, my effort to present John Paul II “from inside,” to be published.

  JUBILEE PILGRIM’S PROGRESS

  Pope John Paul II was in a festive mood at lunch on Tuesday, January 4, 2000. He always loved the Christmas season and Christmas 1999 had been something special: at Midnight Mass on December 24/25, he’d opened the Holy Door of the Vatican basilica, St. Peter’s, to begin the Great Jubilee of 2000—the “key” to his pontificate, as he often put it.

  Outside the windows of the papal apartment a Goodyear blimp sailed lazily back and forth across the Roman sky, circling a Piazza San Pietro full of tourists and pilgrims. John Paul seemed to find this aerial Americana both amusing and an omen for the year ahead. Twice during lunch, he pointed out the window as the blimp floated past and said to his guests, “You see? Buon’anno!”

  It was indeed a good year, the last before the world changed on September 11, 2001. It was also a peripatetic one for me as I spent the better part of the Great Jubilee on the road, speaking about Witness to Hope as it appeared in one language edition after another. Between September 1999 and December 2000, I traveled to more than forty American and two Canadian cities (some of them multiple times), as well as to Rome (five times), Paris, Madrid, Mexico City, Lisbon, Pamplona, Sydney, Melbourne, Warsaw, Gdańsk, Poznań, Wrocław, and, of course, Kraków. I was also in Jerusalem for John Paul’s epic Holy Land pilgrimage in March 2000, working with NBC News. By the end of the jubilee, Witness to Hope had appeared in English, Czech, French, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Slovak, and Spanish; Russian, German, Slovenian, Romanian, and Ukrainian editions would follow over the next decade.

  Richard Neuhaus’s intuition that my life would be dramatically changed by that dinner of consequence in December 1995 proved true: I became a kind of “witness to the witness,” explaining John Paul II’s life and thought in venues ranging from wholly friendly to deeply hostile. In doing so, I continued to learn new things about the world Church and the reception of John Paul’s historic papacy. Yet as my lectures and interviews looked back on what Karol Wojtyła had accomplished in a remarkable eight decades, I was also looking ahead, for I never thought of Witness to Hope as the end of the journey. Rather, it was the first installment of a story I intended to complete. So as I was speaking about that book, I was gathering materials and conducting interviews that would help me finish the John Paul II story when the time came.

  And, of course, my conversations with John Paul himself continued. In the years after the Great Jubilee of 2000, our joint pilgrims’ progress would enter several dark valleys. Here, I want to describe my experience of John Paul in the jubilee and the reception of Witness to Hope, which in some respects was as instructive about the state of the Church and the world as the journey preparing it had been.

  A LONG EMBRACE

  ROME, SEPTEMBER 1999

  ON SEPTEMBER 3, 1999, A BOX WITH MY AUTHOR’S COPIES OF Witness to Hope arrived at my home. I had to steady myself before opening it; my hands were trembling. When I got the box open I was exultant, and while finding a few typos (that were my fault) I was deeply grateful to Sue Llewellyn and the others on Diane Reverand’s team for a beautiful piece of bookmaking. Handel’s Dettingen Te Deum was cued up on the CD player in my study and accompanied me as I read around in the book; that seemed right, as Sue, Diane, Cathy Hemming, and the other good people at HarperCollins were not the only parties to whom I o
wed thanks for the culmination of over three years of work.

  I left for Rome on September 18; I wanted to give the book to John Paul II before it was officially released in the United States, and Msgr. Dolan at the North American College had arranged for a public lecture in which I could present the book to a Roman audience. Dolan then went one better and offered to host a lunch for curial officials and other locals who had been helpful in my work, which was held in the college’s Red Room on the afternoon of September 23. There were aperitivi, and when the guests came to their places at table, each found an autographed copy of Witness to Hope waiting for him.

  It was fun to see some of the more senior of these churchmen picking up the book, examining it, but not daring to look at the index for fear of seeming self-interested. Msgr. Dolan proposed a first toast, to the Holy Father, and we had an antipasto. Then Dolan asked me to propose a second toast. I said I wanted to offer a toast of thanks to all present for their help—and in doing so, to note the self-discipline of the members of the Roman Curia, for no one had yet snuck a look at the index. The toast was quickly drunk and no sooner were the glasses on the table than everyone was perusing the index and the comments were shooting to and fro—“I have four citations.” “Well, I have six.”

  Bishop Ryłko seemed extremely happy with the book and must have called Castel Gandolfo on his return from that luncheon, for at 7:30 that evening he called to say that we were to have dinner at the papal villa the following night.